Ex-Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez wants convictions overturned

The Associated Press

Published 12:00 am, Monday, January 9, 2012

HARTFORD -- Former Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez asked the state's second-highest court on Monday to overturn his five corruption convictions, alleging insufficient evidence and mistakes made by a lower court judge.

Perez's lawyers filed a 61-page appeal brief with the state Appellate Court just before Monday afternoon's deadline. He was convicted by a Hartford Superior Court jury in June 2010 and later sentenced to three years in prison, but he remains free on an appeal bond.

One of Perez's main arguments is that his constitutional rights to a fair trial and due process were violated when Judge Julia Dewey combined two unrelated corruption cases against him into one trial. Perez's lawyers, Hope Seeley and Hubert Santos, say lumping all the charges together prejudiced the jury against their client.

"The deck was unfairly stacked against Mr. Perez," the brief says. "In a climate where political corruption cases had been front page news in recent years in this state, the stacking of these wholly unrelated corruption cases achieved the precise result for which the state hoped: certain conviction."

Perez wants the Appellate Court to at least grant him two new trials. It's not clear when the court will hear arguments in the case.

Perez, Hartford's first Hispanic mayor, was first arrested in January 2009. He was charged with receiving a bribe from a city contractor and friend, Carlos Costa, by paying only $20,000 for $40,000 worth of home renovations performed by Costa, and only paying the $20,000 after he was questioned by a grand jury about the improvements. Costa told authorities he didn't expect to get paid for the home improvements because that was the "cost of me doing business with the city," according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

In the second case, Perez was arrested in September 2009 when state authorities charged him and former state Rep. Abraham Giles of Hartford with trying to extort a $100,000 payment to Giles from a developer who wanted to buy city-owned property. The alleged deal never went through.

Perez also claims in his appeal that his right to testify was violated when the two cases were combined into one, because he wanted to testify in the bribery case but not in the attempted extortion case. The 54-year-old Democrat also says there was insufficient evidence to convict him.

Perez is a one-time gang leader who rose from an impoverished childhood to become a community activist and, in 2001, mayor of Connecticut's capital city. He resigned the mayor's job in 2010 after he was convicted.

Perez's wife said he wasn't home Monday afternoon. He didn't immediately return a message.

The state's corruption probe snared several people.

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Giles, who died last March, was sentenced to a one-year conditional discharge in 2010 after pleading guilty to corruption charges. Costa was spared prison time and sentenced to 100 hours of community service last year after pleading no contest to misdemeanor aiding and abetting coercion.

Hartford City Councilwoman Veronica Airey-Wilson, was granted the accelerated rehabilitation probation program in 2010 and a charge of tampering with evidence was dismissed. Authorities said she received free home improvements from Costa and falsified records to make it look like she paid for the work.